Colours you should avoid when undertaking a campaign

Campaigns are all about designs, colours and little text. In some instances, the image or graphic is enough to relay your message to your audience.

Regardless of the method, all your advertising should be clear and consistently reflect the unique positioning statement of your business.

Most companies prefer to add text on the image or video and all these comprises of combination of colours. Colours are a very powerful tool, they have the ability to attract people.

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Some colours are highly engaging than others. The whole idea behind advertisement is to create something appealing to your target customers.

Therefore, you need to learn the basic colour rules that will help in making your ads more appealing and engaging to your potential customers.

Serving your website with ads is a good way of earning the extra bucks but you need to learn to focus on avoiding colours that could hurt your ad conversion.

Merchandisers pay graphics gurus and psychologists millions to find the ideal colour for their product or packaging that will draw out certain emotional responses from prospects.

Similarly, branding and advertising agencies brainstorm on their choice of colours when designing a brand promotion program or advertising campaign.

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Careful selection of the right colours in an advertisement can relay a powerful message to viewers even before they start reading and understanding what the advertisement is promoting.

Conversely, the wrong choice of colours and colour combinations can make a message difficult to read.

Here are some colours to avoid in your next advert campaign.

Green or yellow on white background

Placing light coloured text such as yellow or green on a white background will create readability problems. When using a white background, it is better to go with darker shades of grey or black.

Also, it is a big NO to use the same text colour as your background colour. Many ads use the white gradient in their ads and it works well when it is blended with a different text colour.

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So avoid using the same colour for both your ad text and gradient. Another tip is not to use more than one gradient on a single ad. It is always best to use darker colours for your text when you are using a white background for your ad design.

Rainbow or neon colours

Though these colour combinations are eye-catching, they are also aversive and irritating. They tire the eyes of viewers very quickly, and usually end up causing aggravation instead of the positive feelings that brands want customers to associate with their product or service.

When you use multiple colours on your ad, it could confuse your prospective customers. It is a bad colour approach when creating ads even when you carefully choose the colours to use for your ad boxes.

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Presenting different colours all at once for your ad can become confusing and your customers will not know where to start reading. It is still a rule of the thumb to limit the number of colours to use when designing your ad into two to three colours only.

It is important to carefully select colours that will easily pass your message than having a parade of flamboyant colours flying everywhere on you ad.

Blue, red, or purple on black background

Unless you are looking to create a ‘goth’ look, it’s best to avoid red text or images on a black background. Purple and blue are just as bad when placed on a black background because they are completely unreadable.

In fact, black is not a good choice of background colour because it overwhelms every other colour on the advert. Using black in ads produces the effect of exclusivity with a hint of corporate touches.

Black exudes a formal effect on an ad and unless you aim to provide an ad with a touch of formality, there are other colour options to use as background for your advertisement. But when you use black as a background colour, you should not use the colours red, blue and purple for your texts.

These colours do not simply blend well on a black background and the text will become hard to read by your target customers. In fact, even when you try using other colours on a black background, the effect may produce the same sense of becoming unreadable, even on a white text.

Black is a very strong colour that easily overpowers other colours on an ad.

Coloured text with textured background

No matter how good a colour is, if the text is placed directly on a textured background, particularly a strong coloured one, it simply won’t be readable.

If you want to place text on an image, consider reducing the opacity of the background or placing the text in a box with a modified background. Using a coloured texture background could make the coloured text unreadable.

This could make your ad look disorganized and not pleasing to the eyes. This is particularly true when the coloured textured background uses strong colours that may easily overpower the coloured text on your ad.

Blue, yellow, or magenta on red background

Though yellow contrasts well with red, the combination can make a viewer dizzy. As with black, red is overwhelming and hard to balance well with most other colours.

The red colour has a striking effect when used as a background for your ads. While the colour red symbolizes power, vitality and energy there are other colours that don’t blend well with the colour red.

These colours are yellow, blue and magenta. When they are added as the colour text on a red background, the effect could be overpowering and the eye will have the difficulty in balancing the colour combination to the eyesight.

Avoid these colour blends when designing your ads as it could encourage your readers not to read it anymore.

Conclusion

Colours are wonderful – they can excite your audience, calm them, or give them the feeling of reassurance. When correctly harnessed, the psychology of colour combines with proper colour selection to match the products or services offered will form the basis of a winning marketing campaign.

Advertising is communication intended to inform, educate, persuade, and remind individuals of your product or businesses. Advertising must work with other marketing tools and business elements to be successful.

Advertising must be interruptive — that is, it must make you stop thumbing through the newspaper or thinking about your day long enough to read or hear the ad. Advertising must also be credible, unique, and memorable in order to work.

Like all effective marketing support, it must be built upon a solid positioning strategy. Finally, for any advertising campaign, enough money must be spent to provide a media schedule for ad frequency, the most important element for ad memorability.

Word-of-mouth advertising has existed as long as mankind has communicated and traded goods and services. Word-of-mouth advertising is considered the most effective form. It has the desired qualities of strong credibility, high audience attention levels, and friendly audience reception.

It features open-ended conversation with questions and answers about the product, psychological incentives to purchase, memorability, efficiency and frequency.

Word-of-mouth advertising passes product information to many other potential buyers (and may even include promotional trial demonstrations and free sampling), at little or no cost to the business.

Whenever possible, a small business should build an advertising program that results in word-of-mouth advertising. Satisfied customers are your best advertisements.

In some respects, typical media advertising acts only as a catalyst to achieve word-of-mouth advertising and increased sales.

Successful advertising will achieve many times more ad mentions through word-of-mouth than the number of paid media presentations of the ads.

Share with me your thoughts on colours and how they can be used to boost sales or engagements.